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I'm afraid Chavez heart already belongs to someone else.  Pictured here Chavez as the Bride and former Tuga Prime Minister Jose Socrates as the groom. This from the days(2008) where these two had a blooming love life, involving oil and children laptops. Chavez claimed that Socrates was his(and by extension the whole of Venezuela) friend in Europe. Now one is dead and the other in jail. How things changed.
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Dec 7, 2014 19:10
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 22:55 |
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blowfish posted:What is it with places conquered hundreds of years ago that still want to reclaim their very very very far removed heritage of independence? Hundreds of years of "let's fight another war over [tiny piece of land bordered by three large powers] this year" should've crushed any desire to rock the boat when it comes to redrawing borders Catalonia and the Basque country are the more sane and with cause examples of Independence movements in Iberia. The Azores and the Madeira(Portugal), and Canary Islands(Spain) all have pro-independence movements. Yes, a bunch of islands with a handful of people living in them want to be independent from the respective mainlands. During the confusion of 74-76 that followed the fall of the Estado Novo, actual terrorist groups emerged in Madeira and Azores. They went away when the new Portuguese government made the islands into autonomous regions, but there are still a bunch of nutters in those islands that want to breakaway with the mainland. In the Azores the local fascist independence party(PDA), after years of being repeatly mocked and marginalized in the Azores parliament decided to go all ETA(with the hoods and everything!) and make a public statement of going underground and all that noise. Problem is that before going rogue, they were a recognized party by the courts in the Azores and in the Mainland, so all of their members and militants are registered and the police known exactly who these clowns are. The big boss of PDA claims that in 2 years the Azores will be fully independent. Which of course is not happening, first because the Azores is bankruppted, second because the only thing keeping those islands afloat is the naval base in Lajes leased out to the Americans and PDA wants the Americans out, and third because lol. The Madeira independence movement is stranger. Madeira is the second richest region in Portugal, so a lot if it's basically "sticking up to the establishment in the 'Continete'!" largely personafied by it's colourful president Alberto João Jardim, the Fidel Castro da Madeira. The nickname isn't because he is communist, but he has been Madeiras President since 1978. It also makes him the longest (freely) democraticly elected ruler in the world. Jardim hates and derides every single government in the mainland, regardless if its PS or PSD(Jardim's party and current government). PSD has been for years trying to get rid of Jardim, but the man rules his party side with an iron fist. Not even a handful days ago, the Madeira members of Parliament voted against the government proposed tax reform, which has set off yet again a new inner party war. However Jardim time is up. He is resigning in January and not going to run for elections in Madeira again, though he is thinking of moving to the main Parliament which would be a riot. Many reasons for this, one is that it's been that long, the other is that the Madeira is completley broke, and the Madeira electorate is starting to turn on Jardim. There's also the fact that the regional government tried to hide the real financial situation of the islands from the mainland. Three years ago the Bank of Portugal and the Public Ministry found out certain discrepancies in the public accountings of the regional government, a billion euros in debt that were "forgotten" somewhere. This became part of a bigger criminal and fraud investigation called "Cuba Livre", but the Ministry of Finance at the time(then headed by Victor Gaspar) decided not to follow up with it's own investigations, it simply added the debt to the national books and rolled with it, so the matter is dead. The Canary Islands independent movement is the really weird one, it runs from Right to Left, fascists, liberals, enviromentalists, communists, at some point even Berber nationalism. More recently one of these movements appeared on Portuguese news, as a group of Canary enviromentalists activists landed and occupied the Savage Islands, a group of islands that belong to the archipelago of the Madeira and therefor claimed by Portugal. This group of criminals claimed that the Savages belonged to (a Free Independent) Canary Islands, this act of agression was answered by the brave Portuguese Navy who kicked these terrorisrs out of our sovereign territory and sent them packing back to Spain. This Wikipedia article clearly written by Spanish Nationalists will tell you that the Savages are actually closer to the Canaries than Madeira, but it's all lies. Those islands are Portuguese. The actual islands are completley useless, just a bunch of rocks with seaguls, but they give Portugal the largest maritime economic exclusive zone in the EU. The size of the zone is always highlighted by Portuguese politicians as a matter of pride(size issues), and of cultural heritage(land of sailors). Yet Portugal has the same rules in fishing and the likes as everyone else in the EU regardless of sea size, so the zone is really a burden on public finances and Navy budget, which is how you end up with the state purchasing two broken submarines from crooked German military sub-contractors. Though nobody is going to admit that. But those dumb barren islands continue on to be a sticking point between Portugal and Spain, because both governments believe that their part of the Atlantic is filled with oil, and none want to miss out on that party. There's also the bizarre case of the Algarve, that continues on to believe that isn't really part of Portugal because it was conquered last, and was always refered to as a kingdom aside. 
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Dec 8, 2014 17:14
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Portuguese media doesn't even report about non-parliamentary parties. It also doesn't report major elections, as Portuguese constitutional law affords every party a degree of fair media share during elections. Media barons claim that this law infringes on their free speech rights, the actual reason is that it would take effort and that tv channels would have to rearrange their telenovela schedule. Luckly PS, PSD/CDS were aware of this and decided to redraw the law so we could have TV debates, with the special clause that all debates and commentary had to be State approved, so now the media can shout about "Like Orwell wrote!" all they want. It's like they all in this together or something. If it wasn't clear all TV main channels, and production teams, are filled with PS-PSD muppets. The most watched news programs has a government mouthpiece as main political commentator every saturday, who was a previous secretary general of PSD and the political mentor of our dear leader Passos Coelho, whose sole job and function on this Earth is to soundboard the latest bad idea of our government. What irks me about him, other than the guy being a miserable human being, is that the tagline for his half hour spot is "The Opinion that Counts."
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Dec 9, 2014 16:27
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Lamadrid posted:I might write something small about Bankia not just the Black Credit Cards but the failure to calculate the value of the assests the day of its IPO. Are you also talking about the bailout and the European Commission telling Bankia to gently caress off with their international ventures? That's the only story we got around here, when Bankia closed down it's operations in Portugal(and elsewhere). The banking situation in Portugal is also hosed up beyond repair, pretty much every single Portuguese bank has been going bankrupt since 2008, requiring ever bigger and crazier bailout schemes or being sold to foreign private companies at discount price before it all breaks down. I'm piecing an effort post on the Espirito Santo Bank(BES) situation, as BES is(was) the biggest Portuguese financial institute and bank, and it completley collapsed in the space of weeks. It's a story that begins with BES being considered to corrupt for Luxembourg market regulators.
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Dec 10, 2014 13:47
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I like the random "welcome to the terrorist kingdom of ESPANISTAN!" comment in the Publico news page.
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Dec 11, 2014 14:31
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The role of the modern monarch is for show and tourism. Every once in a while they do something that reminds the people that they are living in luxury on taxpayer money. Juan Carlos always had scandals but the last one just happened to coincinde during an economic meltdown and the people didn't forgive him so fast. So he did the smart thing, leave, and now the Spanish have forgotten all about it cause Felipe is so handsome and tall and cool and maybe he should feed his wife once in awhile
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Dec 15, 2014 21:57
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New polls in Portugal as we get closer and closer to election campaigns. Despite being helmed by the Portuguese Obama, Antonio Costa, PS still hasn't reached the high numbers from May(over 38%) when the non-citizen Seguro was secretary general. This lead over the PSD-CDS coalition still doesn't give him absolute majority, which means that PS is once again hitting the streets and remembering folk of the "Centre Bloc" in 76(a PS-PSD coalition) and how good it was. It showed real vision and political guts you know. But this poll also shows other good news to PS. Due to the recent events surronding the arrest of former prime minister and Socialist Saint José Socrates over corruption and fraud charges, many believed that it would rock the party, but as it turns out nobody gives a gently caress. Most portuguese think he deserves to be in jail, but it doesn't reflect poorly on the party. The rest is typical, coalition parties going down, Communist Party lounging in 10%. More relevant this marks the political debut of PDR(populist party headed by morning tv super lawyer/judge Marinho Pinto) as they entered the race with 2.2%, meanwhile LIVRE(the left to unite the left) is still (very) slowly growing. Both together already surpass the sinking BE, which at this rate stands a serious chance of simply disappearing. They fixed their leadership, but secretary general Catarina Martins is only slighly more popular than the Prime Minister, which means nobody actually likes her. Also PDR logo is some of the laziest poo poo ever, and that says a lot. http://expresso.sapo.pt/sondagem-ps-sobe-apesar-de-socrates=f902376
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Dec 17, 2014 17:27
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DXH posted:Is that typical in Portuguese politics? I mean, is the behavior of individual politicians seen separately from their political party as a whole? I know in the States it's like that more or less, and when an American politico fucks up they will quickly resign and divorce themselves from the party to minimize fallout. Here in Spain the main parties want the public to view them that way as well, but more and more Spaniards are wising up to the endemic corruption in the mainstream (and not so mainstream) Spanish political parties. Portuguese tend to vote for the Party and not the man/woman. Compare it to UK politics, where a strong personality like Thatcher or Blair can take the Party pretty far, but at the end of the day you can still go with the village idiot as PM candidate and win elections, as most folk vote Conservative Party not David Cameron. I find that US politics to be far more personality driven, you know the OBAMA/BIDEN style of posters and campaigns, people going HILLARY 2016 and all that. Here it's always about the Party first and that's what you'll see in posters and during campaigns: "Vota Partido Socialista", "Politica Patriotica e de Esquerda vota Partido Comunista Portugues". Yet a good secretary general, or great individual militants can make the difference when poo poo hits the fan. The situation with Socrates could've gone very wrong for PS, if the secretary general wasn't as savvy and experienced as Antonio Costa. Costa handled the whole mess perfectly, he told all the Socialist rank and file to pipe down and be quiet about Socrates just few hours after his arrest, and made the PS message about the whole case to be one of "Let justice take its course" and "That's Socrates problem", he divorced the party from Socrates. Which really is an incredible feat, as weeks before the arrest PS was proclaiming Socrates as a great man stabbed in the back by the The usual method of a Party handling bad stuff or rogue members is simply grab whoever hosed things up, take them to the back of the shed and put them out of their misery quietly. People simply vanish from politics in Portugal if they mess up, and you'll never hear from them again or what they did. Antonio José Seguro was the leader of PS for 3 years straight but now doesn't even feature in the Christmas dinner list of his party. The Party survives untouched or damaged, the men and women not so much. Exceptions exist though. CDS lives and dies on the popularity of its secretary general Paulo Portas. The man is a complete piece of poo poo, but he is a brillian politician who has managed to stay alive and remain popular in politics for almost 20 years.(If you check that link you'll see that he is the second most popular leader in Portugal, behind Antonio Costa) However he has stayed so long in front of CDS that it has essentially become a one man party. I find people who vote for Portas, but rarely for CDS. This is an issue that the members of CDS seem to be aware, as they have been trying to get rid of Portas for years now, but they can't find anybody who is at least a third as good as Portas, so when he leaves he will drag the party with him. There's also the Marinho Pinto effect. Marinho Pinto was a big shot lawyer/judge that in the last decade or so, became a regular fixture in tv morning shows and commentator spots as the guy that tells "things as he sees it". He ran for the Euro-parliament in this last election with MPT, a party only a handful of people knew it existed. He got elected and even managed to get two seats in Strasbourg.(He already quit by the way) This was a shock for everybody, as I mentioned in another post, Portuguese media doesn't talk about parliament outsiders. This result comes from Marinho Pinto being a sort of TV celebrity. He left MPT, and formed his own party, PDR which you can see is already showing up in the polls. Nobody really knows what exactly this party is, but they know the man and he is going to ride that wave to get himself elected into parliament. It's also important to note that what is happening with José Socrates is completley unique to Democratic Portuguese history. Not only is the first time a Prime Minister has been arrested over corruption charges, but it also happened to the man everybody thought to be untouchable. But that's a story for another post. Electronico6 fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Dec 18, 2014 |
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Dec 18, 2014 14:37
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Zsa Zsa Gabor posted:I've been away from Portugal for a while now, and don't follow the news as much I used to so I'm probably misinformed, but wasn't the timing of his arrest somewhat strange? Like the week before some minister resigned because he's somehow associated with people indicted in a gold visas court case? Passos Coelho probably had a heart attack when he saw Socrates being arrested in an airport LIVE ON TELEVISION(!!!!), as he is involved in many similar schemes as his predecessor(though on a smaller scale). Look, no major government party is ever going put another through hell, because it sets horrible precedents, and if you start accusing the other party of being corrupt you invite people to check your own house too. PS, PSD, and CDS all bury their skeletons in the same graveyard. What is currently happening is something that is beyond their power, not PSD trying to hide it's mess by putting PS on a bad spot. Like the stuff with Socrates, the gold visas and BES all deserve their own effort posts cause there's some really crazy poo poo in that. BES managed to piss off Luxembourg and Switzerland market regulators, and almost every single federal agency in the US, all at the same time. With the gold visas Portugal either knowingly or unknowingly gave residency and asylum to a Chinese being hunted by the Chinese Communist Party which is just the last thing you want to rile up when you have your country being bought in volume by the CCP. Also that Chinese was being hunted by Interpol, so Portas couldn't even make up that this poor Chinese said the wrong thing about Taiwan. This is literally the kind of people the Portuguese gold visa scheme has attracted, folk considered too corrupt for loving China. While Socrates was basically game over for a man who was involved in so many corruption and fraud cases in the last 20 years, that it's easier to names the ones he isn't. The timing may be off, but I believe it's one of those cases of "When isn't the world/country at crisis?", but most important is that is jig is up for many a people. The crisis did more than just make the average Portuguese poorer, it put an end to a particular entrenched establishment and several practices by exposing the State weaknesses, and the fact that troika rules and new EU directives no longer allow for the kind of nonsense that the old politicians got away with. "Os dias das vacas gordas" are gone and will never come back. It's basically the end, and what were are witnessing is indeed, everything rotting and crumbling at the same time. Similar things are happening in Spain. Electronico6 fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Dec 18, 2014 |
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Dec 18, 2014 16:51
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Currently the Autonomous Government of the Azores is having a big cry about the US reducing it's active troops in the Lajes Air Base in the island of Terceira and it's economical impact on the Azores archipelago, and wants the government of Portugal to do something about it.(lol) "This isn't how we treat friends and allies" The Azores/Portugal should just grow a pair and sell it to China.
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Jan 19, 2015 17:48
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Cool and new exciting politics in Spain let's check out Portugal   If it wasn't for PDR and LIVRE, this could be a poll taken from January 2005. Also lol the Costa effect. "PS isn't PASOK!!! (We also ain't SYRIZA)"
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Feb 9, 2015 17:02
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To be fair, PCP has played a part in turning the Portuguese Left into the sinkhole it is, it's not just PS.
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Feb 9, 2015 21:46
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Mans posted:I'm not excusing PCP but they're the only ones who actually talk about PS like it really is instead of still pretending it's a leftist thing. Pretty sure Bloco de Esquerda has been doing that for that last years and it cost them a major chunk of their electorate. A lot of people don't give a poo poo about this "True Left-Wing" nonsense that runs from PS to MRPP, but I think most people would welcome a party on the left that would play with PS, if only to avoid the disaster coalitions PS had to make over the last 40 years with PSD and CDS, pointless minority governments like Guterres, and reign in it's worst aspects like Socrates. Livre has good chance of that, now that it got the support of Oliveira and Drago who have more presence in Portuguese politics than Tavares, but it all seems too late. Our next government is most likely be some retarded PS/PSD poo poo. PCP does one thing, and it does very well, yet it's pretty clear the party is not and doesn't want to be a real solution or alternative to the ruling Centre parties. It's content being the 12% protest party and that's about it, but it's existence on the Portuguese Left has become firmly establishment by this point, it doesn't support or even abide the existence of movements outside of it's control, like Indignados e Que se Lixe a TROIKA, and it put an end to these movements when it sent back it's pet union CGTP back unto the streets, and since then a lot of the citizen protest in Portugal had it's wind taken out of it. The party had a face lift, but it's still the same stupid party that clings to positions taken 40 years ago, supports North Korea against American Imperialism, defends the memory of the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart, and complains about Nazis in the Ukraine on the parliament floor as if it were a Youtube comment section. Really PCP needs to let go all that Cunhal baggage and move on, they could a lot better as it stands it's so very frustrating.
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Feb 10, 2015 12:01
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 22:55 |
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Mans posted:Bloco lost votes because it kept trying to be PS's lapdog, not because it was too anti-PS. It got a lot of splits exactly because they were going to the center. Outside of the feminist aspect i don't even see Bloco as having much to do with the left when you look at their propaganda of recent times. With CDU getting more and more friendly torwards feminism (loving finally) i think Bloc has become byzantine. This is straight up false. BE has been doing the opposite of this since Louça became secretary general, or are you forgetting everything that happened with Joana Amaral Dias in 2006, not taking the coalition deal with Socrates in 2009, voting against PEC IV, refusing to attend the troika meetings(attend not signing it), and the last years of Martins/Semedo leadership where it has been simply adrift without a solid line of thinking, and now that Martins is running solo it still isn't going to change. Many of the splits within BE was due the party turning a poor parody version of PCP, and Louça favouring his friends like Mortagua. BE isn't buddy to PS, it hasn't been for 10 years now, and they can't walk away from the corner they got themselves into. It's a useless party as essentially it serves no purpose on Portuguese politics. It doesn't have the history or the connections that PCP has, it's talent and charisma has all gone away, and it always dodges the question of a PS/BE partnership, and at this point PS is probably no longer interested. quote:I'm not even going to comment on the extremely sad remark about CGTP being PCP's lapdog. CGTP has more members than PCP. CGTP has PS and PSD leaders working side to side with communists. It's the biggest defender of worker rights in the country. If you still have any work conditions, security or wages it's because of CGTP. CGTP is a "lapdog" of the unionized workers who pay their dues, elected their representatives and make their demands. I'm neither disputing CGTP work or it's place as a force for worker rights. But much like UGT, CGTP is part of the Party political game. Getting CGTP leadership back was very important for Jeronimo de Sousa's rebuilding of PCP, as the party was desperate in need of having again a force to work on the streets. With Carvalho da Silva running CGTP, a name you'll most likely see on PS short list for President, this simply wasn't possible. Armenio Carlos is a PCP militant and sits on PCP national congress table, he won the union leadership with PCP backing, and works along side Sousa on planning strikes, demonstrations, and rallies. Much of the regional and municipal administration has also been going to unionist that are directly affiliated to PCP. I know my CGTP very well, I go to their rallies and I know plenty of people inside the Algarve administration, not a particular stranger either to it's inner workings or infighting, and CGTP today is very much a PCP business. Where that's good or bad depends on the point of view I guess. It's a union that is far more active today than 5 years ago, but it's clearly no longer capable of working out a bigger mass of people or command more weight like it used to be.(Though that is very much Silva's fault) quote:Cunhal wrote some pretty big criticisms of the soviet bloc and why it failed This does not change that he still died believing the USSR was the greatest force of good in the world, and that denouncing the Soviet Union is still grounds to get you kicked out of the party. Electronico6 fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Feb 10, 2015 |
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Feb 10, 2015 17:58
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